Pinterest expands attributions, gives credit where credit’s due

While popular with its 10.4m (mostly female) members, Pinterest has been quite the bone of contention with certain sites who feel that pins of their content aren’t sufficiently credited. However, Pinterest is addressing this problem by providing automated attribution for some of the web’s creative communities.

An update in May addressed this problem by adding attribution for pins from Flickr, YouTube, Behance and Vimeo – a move which inspired Flickr to remove its ‘do not pin’ code and allow pins of photos from the site.

Despite Pinterest’s user guidelines recommending link-backs and credit for sources, users often pin away without regard for where this content is coming from.

The specialised attribution tags counteract this by including the site’s icon and the name of the user who created the content below the pin description. These attribution tags are automatically taken from select sites and Pinterest users cannot amend or remove them.

Attribution outreach programme

Pinterest continues to reach out to these sites with attribution now being extended to photos from 500px, items from Etsy, videos from Kickstarter, presentations from SlideShare and audio from SoundCloud.

Attribution will apply to all content pinned from these sites going forward, but it will also be retroactively applied to the millions of pins already made from these sites, though this will take some time.

In addition, Pinterest has also enabled inline players for content from Kickstarter, SlideShare and SoundCloud.

If you’re wondering how audio clips will be displayed throughout the highly visual site, the selected song’s artwork will form the basis of the pin, which, when clicked, will open up a SoundCloud HTML5 widget for your listening pleasure.

Pinterest has said it is continuing work on adding more sites to the attribution programme, which is an excellent strategy to encourage content sites to integrate pinning, rather than cut it off completely. SoundCloud is clearly on board as users of beta site Next SoundCloud will now be able to pin sounds directly from the share button – a taster of what’s to come when the revised service sees a full release.